The Harlem Uprising, by Christopher Hayes (chapter 6)

THE HARLEM UPRISING

SEGREGATION AND INEQUALITY IN POSTWAR NEW YORK CITY

Christopher Hayes

6 A Death and Protests

It seemed as though Harlem’s history is made on Saturday nights. . . .

People know you shouldn’t bother with Negroes on Saturday night, because for some reason or another, Negroes just don’t mind dying on Saturday night. They seem ready to die, so they’re not going to take but so much stuff.

— CLAUDE BROWN, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND

There are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon.

—JAMES BALDWIN, OCTOBER 1963

New York’s experience with the July uprisings and how people acted and reacted provides us with insights into the local and national civil rights movements as well as African American New Yorkers’ attitudes toward integrationoriented movement goals. From the moment of the shooting, we can see the anger African Americans in New York, especially the young, had been carrying with them and the forthrightness with which they expressed it. Unlike cities in which the southern movement was strong, nonviolence did not predominate as a strategy in New York. Black New Yorkers did not embrace violence, but some found physical attacks on the police appropriate, especially in the face of what they characterized as police murder. Black high-school students at the scene of James Powell’s death had no compunction about

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throwing cans, bottles, concrete, and whatever else they could find at officers.

This is a trend that would continue throughout the uprisings, with thousands of Central Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant residents fighting the police. Some citizens claimed they used physical force only as self-defense against rampaging officers, but their actions violated the tenets of nonviolence nonetheless.

Many more citizens willfully attacked the police from afar, lobbing projectiles at them, while others did so from strategic locations such as rooftops and windows. These were tactics of warfare. Night after night, people waited for their chances to attack the police. Black New Yorkers set the model for the urban upheaval to come in other cities.1 Black New Yorkers’ physical attacks on police demonstrate how little restraining influence national civil rights groups like CORE and the NAACP had in the city. No doubt many Black southerners also wished to physically resist the police, but they rarely did so, partially because of how strong and organized the nonviolent movement was at the local level. New York activists, by contrast, knew the tactics that were so successful in the South, such as sit-ins, boycotts, and provoking white violence, were not effective in the city.

Black New Yorkers and their white allies had used these tactics for several decades but won little. For example, they sat in at municipal offices and union halls, picketed stores in Black neighborhoods whose owners would not hire Black workers, and boycotted schools to secure desegregation. The tactics were largely ineffective because there were no discriminatory laws to defeat or crudely racist officials to expose to the world, as was the case in the South.

While southern activists had clear targets in Jim Crow laws, there was no written system of oppression in the North. Northern segregation was diffuse, not centralized.2 Though the heads of three major national civil rights organizations lived in or around the city, they and their groups never dominated activism in New York, nor did their ideologies of gradualism and integration.3 They were unable to offer Black New Yorkers many tangible achievements in terms of jobs, better housing, or desegregated education, which precluded the established groups from building a strong base in the city’s Black neighborhoods they could have used to quiet the chaos once it began.

In fact, during the uprisings many residents of Central Harlem and BedfordStuyvesant vocally rejected anyone preaching nonviolence and restraint, not just on the streets but also at demonstrations, mass meetings, and Powell’s funeral. Groups of people regularly shouted down as Uncle Toms and liberals those pleading for calm or speaking of voter registration, whether the national

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Figure 6.1 The “Big Six” national civil rights leaders meet at the Hotel Commodore in New York City in 1963. From left: John Lewis, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Whitney Young Jr., Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, AFL-CIO; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Southern Christian Leadership Conference; James Farmer, Congress of Racial Equality; Roy Wilkins, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62-126847.

movement veteran Bayard Rustin or an unknown local worker. The same people enthusiastically applauded militant and Black nationalist speakers who excoriated the police and advocated guerilla warfare.

Throughout the disorder and from the moment of the shooting, demonstrators, witnesses, and participants drew continual links between the civil rights movements in New York City and in the South. The connections they expressed show that while there were distinct regional wings of the movement, African Americans commonly viewed it as one struggle. People from school children to seasoned organizers frequently referred to race relations in the city as being equivalent to or worse than Mississippi, the state widely understood to have the

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Figure 6.2 15,000 demonstrators in a Harlem solidarity march for voting rights and racial justice, on March 14, 1965, one week after state and local law enforcement brutalized marchers in Selma, Alabama. While the northern and southern movements were distinct, they were closely connected.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62-135695.

worst record on civil rights in the country, to see the most violence against African Americans, and to be the most dangerous place to do civil rights work.

New York was supposed to be different, but many people were not so sure. The southern movement and the violence its participants faced were frequently on the minds of many of New York’s Black citizens in 1964, both as a comparison and a source of anger. What happened in the South mattered in the North.

Killing Thursday, July 16, 1964, started out as an ordinary summer day in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood. It was hot and humid, as it typically is in the city in

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July, with the temperature already at 76 degrees by nine AM and reaching 85 before the end of the day. That morning, James Powell and Thomas Gilligan crossed paths through coincidence, forever changing the city’s history. Powell, a fifteen-year-old African American boy from the Bronx, was attending summer school at Robert F. Wagner Junior High School on East Seventy-Sixth Street, between Second and Third Avenues in the city’s Yorkville neighborhood. He had enrolled in a supplemental reading course that began ten days earlier. The previous summer, he worked as a local youth organizer for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he attended along with 55,000 others from the city.4 Neighbors and friends characterized Powell as “a nice guy” who stayed out of trouble.5 Gilligan, thirty-six years old, having spent the last seventeen of those with the New York Police Department, had the day off from his job as a lieutenant in Brooklyn’s Fourteenth Division. A military veteran, the lieutenant was a decorated member of the police force, awarded with nineteen citations for outstanding police work, four of them for disarming men with guns. While in a television repair shop across from the school, he heard some commotion outside. Powell and two other students, waiting for school to start, had gotten into an altercation with an apartment building superintendent, Patrick Lynch, after he had sprayed them with a hose.6 The boys, unhappy with being sprayed, chased him back into his building, where he locked himself in his first-floor apartment and called the police.7 According to the NYPD, Gilligan emerged from the repair shop to investigate the noise and saw Powell and his two friends “banging on an apartment door with a garbage can lid.”8 Gilligan’s later testimony before a grand jury was in conflict with this, asserting that what he saw was much more serious: Powell running after Lynch with a three-and-a-half-inch pocketknife. In the lieutenant’s version of events, he stood in front of the apartment building, displaying his badge and gun to Powell with the verbal warning “I’m a police officer. Come out and drop it.” Despite having a gun pointed at him, Powell responded by charging head-on out of the building hallway, knife drawn. Powell, five feet six inches tall and 122 pounds, lunged at Gilligan once, grazing his arm and drawing blood.9 The lieutenant, six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, fired a warning shot, but Powell persisted in his attack. Gilligan then fired three shots at Powell.10 The first missed; the second, proving fatal, initially struck him in the right wrist, severed an artery just above his heart, and came to rest in his left lung; and the third passed through his abdomen, striking the largest vein there.11 By 9:20 AM, James Powell was dead.

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Other witnesses provided a different account of the morning’s events. Some students claimed Patrick Lynch, the apartment building superintendent, called the boys “dirty niggers,” following with the proclamation “I’ll wash you clean” as he deliberately sprayed them.12 Others quoted him as saying “I’m going to wash all the black off you.”13 A nurse who witnessed the shooting said she saw Lynch “spraying a bunch of colored kids and as the kids moved back, he went after them with more water.”14 Lynch pleaded otherwise, quietly asserting he had never had problems with any of the students, calling them a “good bunch” he let sit on his building’s steps to eat lunch every day. He swore that he did not speak a mean word to the boys and had accidentally sprayed them after he “asked them 10 times to move.”15 Some of Powell’s schoolmates reported he and his two friends threw garbage can lids and bottles at Lynch.

A fourteen-year-old girl who was also waiting for school to start that morning told a reporter, “I saw the boy [Powell] go into the building and he didn’t have any knife then. When he came out, he was even laughing and kind of like running.” As other students contended, “when he came out of the hallway, he didn’t have a knife.” Gilligan appeared unannounced and, with no warning, shot Powell. The aforementioned nurse corroborated this: “This tall man with black hair [Gilligan] came out of the radio shop and he had a little black revolver. . . . As the boy came out, he shot him twice and then the boy fell to the sidewalk, and this man stood there for maybe 10 minutes just staring at the body. The boy never had any words with the man.”16 He then kicked Powell’s body or turned it over with his foot, depending on the account. One of the two boys Lynch had sprayed along with Powell maintained Gilligan called Powell a “dirty nigger” after killing him.17 Noticing students crowding around him, he waved his gun around to convince them to move across the street.18 Of all those who witnessed the incident, only one or two backed Gilligan’s assertion that Powell had a knife. Gilligan also had an insignificant cut on his finger.19 One of the dead boy’s friends claimed he had been holding a knife for Powell that morning, which Powell took from him before the shooting but never used.20 Lynch, whom Powell had supposedly menaced with the knife, said he never saw anyone with a knife when interviewed the next day but “had been told about it.”21 A teacher found a knife eight feet away from Powell’s body, between two parked cars, but the police never definitively connected it to Powell, nor did they say much about it publicly.22 They also refused to allow reporters on the scene to photograph it.23 An NAACP investigation gathering information from fifty witnesses concluded Powell was holding a soda can and was walking away

A Death and Protests

from Gilligan when shot.24 The FBI, in its report to President Johnson, accepted the lieutenant’s account verbatim.

The FBI’s investigation into the incident also drew very different conclusions about Powell. According to its findings, “he had begun indiscriminate fighting as early as 7 years of age.” He was described as a terrible student, missing thirty-two days in the 1963–1964 school year. When he did attend, “he was repeatedly accused of bullying other students, picking pockets and even fighting in the guidance office.” Agents reported he was a member of a gang and had once been hospitalized for a stab wound to his leg. And they said he had been arrested at least twice, with one resulting in probation for assault; the other arrest’s conclusion, for attempted robbery, was unclear. This was all ruinous to Powell’s reputation and would likely serve to justify in many people’s minds Gilligan’s taking of his life, either because the boy was so violent that the officer had no choice or because Powell was an incorrigible animal who needed to be removed from the planet. Most significant of all, because of Powell’s age, the bureau had no access to his official record. Where did it get this information, then? “Inquiry in the neighborhood in which the deceased boy lived,” the agency wrote. Whether all true, partially true, or nothing but rumor, this would be the final word on James Powell for many people, at a time when the FBI enjoyed broad and deep trust.25 Within minutes of the shooting, a large, mostly Black crowd gathered at the scene of the shooting in this overwhelmingly white neighborhood to boisterously protest Powell’s death. These were young people arriving for school; teachers managed to maintain order in the twenty-five classes already in progress inside the building. The few police on the scene pushed them away from the area and told them to go either into the school or home. This response not only failed to disperse them but elicited cans, bottles, and chunks of cement sailing through the air in the direction of the patrolmen. The crowd grew to an estimated size of three hundred, despite the best efforts of several teachers and Max Francke, the summer school principal. Using a police megaphone, Francke urged the students to clear the area, but none of them heeded his pleas. As the crowd grew, so did the intensity of emotions, with “young girls [becoming] hysterical, tears streaming down their cheeks.” Some students reportedly screamed, “This is worse than Mississippi!” evincing a visceral sense of the interconnectedness of civil rights struggles throughout the country and the violence African Americans faced at the hands of white people, particularly police. An African American teen girl, in what would become the most sensational quote of the morning, taunted police: “Come on, shoot another nigger!”26

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It took about one hundred steel-helmeted police two hours to disperse the crowd.27 Most of the students belatedly filed into the school. Some walked around the surrounding area engaging in petty vandalism, such as pushing over flowerpots, and a group of young people went into the Seventy-Seventh Street and Lexington Avenue subway station two blocks away, banging on train doors and disturbing a newspaper stand. Nearly two hours after Gilligan shot Powell, East Seventy-Sixth Street was once again clear. One police officer was hit in the head with a soda can and received treatment at a hospital. The police took three “screaming girls” into custody and released them “after they had calmed down.”28 For the next twenty-four hours, the police kept a “special detail” of twenty-five patrolmen in the three blocks around the school to guard against further protest.29 Francke, the older white principal of the summer school, was exceptionally sympathetic toward the protesting students and saw both Patrick Lynch, the building superintendent, and the police as sharing substantial responsibility for what had transpired that morning. The students’ reaction in the street, in Francke’s analysis, was “produced because a white adult,” Lynch, “didn’t use his good sense.” Francke viewed Lynch as having hosed the students “with malice aforethought.” The principal further indicted Lynch as causing the entire chain of events, implying he was partially responsible for Powell’s death: “What could have been handled very promptly and efficiently [the students sitting on the apartment building steps] by the school turned into a tragedy.”30 An important part of this becoming a “tragedy” was a white man aggressively using a hose against Black youth, which the world had seen Sheriff Bull Connor deploy in painful detail just one year earlier in Birmingham, Alabama. Francke argued the police could have prevented the school children from massing in the street and confronting the police “if someone had acted sensibly. If only a couple of police cars had arrived, and if the boy [Powell] could have been removed immediately, along with the lieutenant and key witnesses, none of the disturbance would have occurred.”31 Francke also defended the general population of the summer school students, protesting, “They gave up a summer’s vacation because they wanted to improve themselves. These children are not hooligans. They’re dedicated to improving themselves and we never had any trouble with them.”32 Within two hours after the shooting, representatives from the national office of the Congress of Racial Equality, the city’s East River chapter of CORE, and the New York branch of the NAACP arrived at the NYPD’s nearby Nineteenth Precinct on East Sixty-Seventh Street, all with similar demands. As with all

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homicides, District Attorney Alexander Herman’s office launched an investigation into the shooting, but civil rights groups and many individual citizens wanted more. After meeting with police and hearing the official version of Powell’s shooting, the groups emerged with joint demands for a more probing investigation.33 Blyden Jackson, East River CORE’s chairman, told reporters the shooting required a “civil investigation . . . independent of the police.”34 His organization announced a demonstration for noon on the next day, Friday, July 17, at the Nineteenth Precinct, to push the city to create a “disciplined and impartial committee” to review the shooting.35 The local NAACP declared its insistence for “an immediate investigation by the District Attorney aimed at a possible murder indictment.”36 In a letter to Mayor Wagner, the New York Civil Liberties Union reasoned “that a 6-foot, 220-pound man should be able to relieve a 15-year-old-boy of a pocketknife without killing him or even resorting to the use of firearms.”37

Protest Friday, July 17 brought with it another day of heat and humidity. At 8 AM, when around seventy-five people, again mostly Black and young, gathered to march and sing in protest in front of the school where Gilligan shot Powell on East Seventy-Sixth Street, it was already 74 degrees, with the relative humidity the same number. The NYPD was aware of the CORE-organized demonstration ahead of time and sent fifty police to wait for the students two hours before it began. Initially with nightsticks at the ready, a member of the City Commission on Human Rights convinced the officers’ superiors it would be in everyone’s best interest to keep the weapons out of sight. The students picketed for four hours without incident, chanting such slogans as “Killer cops must go!” and holding signs reading “Save Us From Our Protectors” and “Stop Killer Cops.”

While the protesting students “jeered and hooted” at the police monitoring them, there were no physical interactions between the two groups.38 When the summer school session let out at noon, 150 students joined the demonstrators. By this time, it was 86 degrees. Downtown CORE’s chairman Chris Sprowal worked diligently to keep the protests within the law, giving police no legal excuse to act against the picketers. He urged them, via megaphone, “to behave like ladies and gentlemen.” Sprowal asserted, “People around here just want you to get into trouble so they can point and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ But

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we’re going to fool them, and we’re going to show them that we’ve had some training.” Within a few minutes, the much larger group marched nine blocks to the Nineteenth Precinct, where it was corralled behind a barrier down the street. Police explained that with a firehouse, the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, and the Kennedy Child Study Center all on the same stretch of East Sixty-Seventh Street as the stationhouse, over a hundred people demonstrating would be too chaotic and disorderly. Eventually, police allowed twenty-five from the group to picket in front of the police station. After an hour, the protesters went home. Sprowal left them with the imploration that they continue picketing the school until Powell’s funeral, at which time they should “empty the school” to pack the boy’s funeral service. As the demonstration wound down, a white man yelled, “He deserved killing!” at a group of students leaving. When a few of them went after him, police grabbed the man and told him to leave the area.39 The CORE-led demonstration attracted people from other strains of the city’s ideologically diverse Black Freedom Struggle. Several CORE staffers reported observing three men from Malcolm X’s post–Nation of Islam political group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, interviewing students. Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party were also at the scene and eager to organize. A fifteen-year-old Black boy, claiming to be from Monroe, North Carolina, home of the African American armed-self-defense icon Robert F. Williams, told students, “In Monroe, if the cops shoot a Negro, we arm ourselves and get that cop worse than he got us.” Someone from CORE was quick to counter the boy’s claims in the interest of heading off any further violence, asserting that “the situation is different” in Monroe. He told the crowd that Monroe police were on the front lines of propping up de jure segregation, while in New York City “not all police are racists, although racists predominate.”40

Resistance Tensions in Central Harlem had grown markedly by Saturday, July 18, when James Powell’s body was first put on display for public viewing. Though not mutilated, Powell in an open casket echoed Emmett Till’s Chicago funeral in 1955, with his mother wanting the world to see her son as he was. Over three hundred people attended the afternoon viewing at a funeral home in Harlem, on Seventh Avenue between 132nd and 133rd Streets.41 By 6:30 PM, large crowds

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ISBN: 978-0-231-18186-0

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